A Highly Interactive SXSW

If you were one of the 72,000 highly energized people in Austin, Texas, earlier this month for the 2014 SXSW Music, Film, and Interactive Festival, you might have had the opportunity to connect with Stephen Wolfram and the Wolfram team at this year’s event. Known for showcasing cutting-edge technologies and digital creativity, Stephen was invited by the SXSW committee to present a featured talk for the third year in a row.

Response to Stephen’s talk was overwhelmingly positive, as attendees were inspired and impressed by the possibilities of the Wolfram technology stack. Business Insider, Popular Science, and VentureBeat were just a few of the media outlets on hand to cover the event. In other favorable receptions: Immediately following his featured talk, a book signing of Stephen’s award-winning work, A New Kind of Science, was so well attended that the SXSW bookstore ran out of copies!

All this activity paved the way for interesting conversations in the Wolfram booth throughout the event, where attendees of every age and level had the opportunity to see the Wolfram Cloud and Wolfram Language in action, talk to Wolfram experts, and get hands-on experience with our technologies, including the Wolfram Language and Mathematica running on the Raspberry Pi.

One of the most popular activities in the Wolfram booth at SXSW was “live-coding” with Stephen and other Wolfram team members. Some neat examples of these spontaneous coding demos—from color-mapping countries of the world by GDP and computing stock values over time, to webcam face detection and pop art creation—can be seen and discussed further in the online Wolfram Community.

And in a unique mashup, Rolling Stone captured the moment when computational genius met musical genius at Slashathon, the first-ever music-focused hackathon. The event was hosted by Slash from Guns N’ Roses, and Wolfram provided mentoring for the competition in the form of onsite coding experts and technology access.